A Place For My Books
Welcome
As an avid reader and an avid data nerd, I decided to create this site to track some of my reading and favourite books, both for my own interest and for anyone looking for good book recommendations. Links where applicable are to independent bookstores. Support libraries and independent bookstores!
The yearly lists are ordered chronologically rather than ranked. The author lists are ordered by publication date.
Current Reading
Books I am currently reading
| Cover | Book | Author | Description |
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Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle | Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski | This groundbreaking book explains why women experience burnout differently than men—and provides a simple, science-based plan to help women minimize stress, manage emotions, and live a more joyful life. |
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Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions | Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi | Nigerian author Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi makes her American debut with this dazzling novel which explores her homeland’s past, present, and possible future through the interconnected stories of four fearless globe-trotting women. |
Last 5 books completed
| Cover | Book | Author | Description |
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A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman | Ove, an ill-tempered, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing block association rules and visiting his wife’s grave, has finally given up on life just as an unlikely friendship develops with his boisterous new neighbors. |
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How Long ’til Black Future Month? | N.K. Jemisin | Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction. |
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Legends & Lattes | Travis Baldree | After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time. The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success — not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is. |
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The Alpha Female Wolf: The Fierce Legacy of Yellowstone’s 06 | Rick McIntyre | Following five generations of female wolves—including the famous 06—this gripping family saga set in Yellowstone National Park reveals the pivotal role that female wolves play in pack life. |
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At Night All Blood is Black | David Diop | Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness. |
Yearly Lists
2023
Top 10 Fiction
Top 10 Non-Fiction
Stats
| FicNonfic | PageCount | BookCount |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction | 3,040 | 12 |
| Nonfiction | 2,617 | 8 |
| Total | 5,657 | 20 |
All Books
2022
Top 10 Fiction
| Covers | Book | Author | Description |
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The Mountains Sing | Nguyen Phan Que Mai | A multigenerational tale of the Tr<U+1EA7>n family, set against the backdrop of the Vi<U+1EC7>t Nam War. |
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What Strange Paradise | Omar El Akkad | In What Strange Paradise, Eritreans, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Ethiopians, and Lebanese people all share a dream: To escape their lives and find a better place to live, a nicer future for their children, and an existence away from poverty and the chaos of war and political persecution. |
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The Strangers | Katherena Vermette | The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken. |
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The Overstory | Richard Powers | From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, the novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. |
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Once There Were Wolves | Charlotte McConaghy | The unforgettable story of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves—if she isn’t consumed by a wild that was once her refuge. |
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois | Honoree Fanonne Jeffers | Spanning two hundred years, it takes an intimate look at race, feminism, love, and family as told by a line of unforgettable Black women from America’s South. It focuses on a fictional African American family in Georgia, beginning before the state was Georgia. |
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Sea of Tranquility | Emily St. John Mandel | In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. |
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An Unkindness of Ghosts | Rivers Solomon | Rivers Solomon’s novel is set on a giant generation ship, on an interstellar voyage of centuries, divided between the wealthy, light-skinned upper-deckers and the oppressed, laboring lower-deckers. |
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The Invisible Life of Addie Larue | V.E. Schwab | France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. |
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Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan | It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. |
Top 10 Non-Fiction
| Covers | Book | Author | Description |
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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures | Merlin Sheldrake | When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. |
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A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey | Jonathan Meiburg | An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet’s deep past in their family history. |
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Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey | James Rebanks | The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family’s traditional English farm |
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Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life | Lulu Miller | David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. |
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Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest | Suzanne Simard | Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own. |
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People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present | Dara Horn | Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. |
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Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses | Robin Wall Kimmerer | Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. |
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Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter | Ben Goldfarb | Eager is the powerful story of how one of the world’s most influential species can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and climate change — and how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet. |
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H Is For Hawk | Helen Macdonald | On the surface, H is for Hawk is a falconry book chronicling the training of a Northern Goshawk, and yet it is so much more. It is a brilliantly written memoir of the darkest time in Helen Macdonald’s life, as she struggled to cope with the sudden death of her father, noted photographer Alisdair Macdonald. |
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Laughing with the Trickster | Tomson Highway | Trickster is zany, ridiculous. The ultimate, over-the-top, madcap fool. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have a blast and to laugh ourselves silly. |
Stats
| FicNonfic | PageCount | BookCount |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction | 24,884 | 69 |
| Nonfiction | 12,561 | 40 |
| Total | 37,445 | 109 |
All Books
2021
Top 10 Fiction
| Covers | Book | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
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Pachinko | Min Jin Lee | Pachinko is an epic historical fiction novel following a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. The character-driven story features an ensemble of characters who encounter racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and other aspects of the 20th-century Korean experience of Japan. |
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Transcendent Kingdom | Yaa Gyasi | A portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love. |
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The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafon | The Shadow of the Wind is a coming-of-age tale of a young boy who, through the magic of a single book, finds a purpose greater than himself and a hero in a man he’s never met. |
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Migrations | Charlotte McConaghy | A novel about a woman who has always been running—from her childhood, her mistakes, her memories—and this time, she’s traveling from Greenland to Antarctica, following the world’s last flock of Arctic terns on their final migration. |
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Go, Went, Gone | Jenny Erpenbeck | The tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. |
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Greenwood | Michael Christie | The book uses the ringed cross-section of a tree as an organizing principle and structure. As Christie writes, “Wood is time captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record.” And, in some cases, a handy metaphor for a family tree. |
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The Brothers K | David James Duncan | This novel spans decades in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident. A mother who clings obsessively to religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past. Four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the sixties. |
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Five Little Indians | Michelle Good | The book follows the lives of five young adults as they grapple with life after ‘Indian School’ in the 1960s. From their prison-like residential school on Vancouver Island, they are turfed onto the streets of Vancouver with no support, money, family connections or life skills. |
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Cloud Cuckoo Land | Anthony Doerr | Cloud Cuckoo Land follows five characters whose stories, despite spanning nearly six centuries, are bound together by their mutual love for a single book. |
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Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine | Gail Honeyman | The story of a quirky yet lonely woman whose social misunderstandings and deeply ingrained routines could be changed forever–if she can bear to confront the secrets she has avoided all her life. |
Top 10 Non-Fiction
| Covers | Book | Author | Description |
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The Truth About Stories | Thomas King | “Stories are wondrous things,” award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. “And they are dangerous.” |
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Voices from Chernobyl | Svetlana Alexievich | On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. |
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Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine | James Maskalyk | Maskalyk witnesses the story of “human aliveness”–our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit. And it’s here too that he is swept into the story, confronting his fears and doubts and questioning what it is to be a doctor. |
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Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers | Andy Greenberg | The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it. |
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Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family | Amanda Jette Knox | An inspirational story of accepting and embracing two trans people in a family–a family who shows what’s possible when you “lead with love.” |
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Underland: A Deep Time Journey | Robert Macfarlane | A journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves. |
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Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China | Jung Chang | A family history that spans a century, recounting the lives of three female generations in China, by Chinese writer Jung Chang. First published in 1991, Wild Swans contains the biographies of her grandmother and her mother, then finally her own autobiography. |
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Educated | Tara Westover | Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school. |
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life | George Saunders | A deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible. |
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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Patrick Radden Keefe | The book examines the history of the Sackler family, including the founding of Purdue Pharma, their role in the marketing of pharmaceuticals, and the family’s central role in the opioid epidemic. |
Stats
| FicNonfic | PageCount | BookCount |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction | 20,549 | 55 |
| Nonfiction | 11,451 | 36 |
| Total | 32,000 | 91 |
All Books
2020
Top 10 Fiction
| Covers | Book | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
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Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson | In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a young United States Navy code breaker and mathematical genius, is assigned to the newly formed joint British and American Detachment 2702. This ultra-secret unit’s role is to hide the fact that Allied intelligence has cracked the German Enigma code. |
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Shades of Grey | Jasper Fforde | For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good. But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society. |
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The Left Hand Of Darkness | Ursula K Le Guin | The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a human native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Ai’s mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by a lack of understanding of their culture. |
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A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles | A novel about Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who is condemned by Communists to spend the rest of his life confined in the Metropol, the capital’s most glamorous hotel. |
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Roots | Alex Haley | The story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; it follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley. |
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The Nickel Boys | Colson Whitehead | Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children. |
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The Book of Negroes | Lawrence Hill | The story of Aminata Diallo, who is captured by slave traders in Africa and brought to America. Aminata’s story illustrates the physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, religious and economic violations of the slave trade. |
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Station Eleven | Emily St. John Mandel | Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. |
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Piranesi | Susanna Clarke | A book about a man, Piranesi, living in a grand labyrinth that is filled with statues, beset by floods and surrounded by celestial objects. Piranesi carefully documents the world around him, including the house’s many halls, the tides and the human remains that he finds. |
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The Glass Hotel | Emily St. John Mandel | The book follows the aftermath of a disturbing graffiti incident at a hotel on Vancouver Island and the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme. |
Top 10 Non-Fiction
| Covers | Book | Author | Description |
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The Body: A Guide for Occupants | Bill Bryson | The Body helps you become smarter about how to take care of and use this mechanism that lets you have life by explaining how it’s put together, what happens on the inside, and how it works |
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One Native Life | Richard Wagamese | One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled - from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism - in reclaiming his identity. It’s about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth. |
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The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business | Wright Thompson | The Cost of These Dreams collects many of Thompson’s best articles but with a central theme running through them – the price and struggles that come with seeking and achieving success. |
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When Breath Becomes Air | Paul Kalanithi | The memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University, who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his mid-thirties. Kalanithi uses the pages in this book to not only tell his story, but also share his ideas on how to approach death with grace and what it means to be fully alive. |
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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End | Atul Gawande | A meditation on how people can better live with age-related frailty, serious illness, and approaching death. Gawande calls for a change in the way that medical professionals treat patients approaching their ends. |
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The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America | Thomas King | Neither a traditional nor all-encompassing history of First Nations people in North America, The Inconvenient Indian is a personal meditation on what it means to be “Indian.” |
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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson | The story of how and why millions of Black Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970 to escape the brutality of the Jim Crow Laws and find safety, better pay, and more freedom in what is known today as The Great Migration. |
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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption | Bryan Stevenson | A memoir by American attorney Bryan Stevenson that documents his career defending disadvantaged clients. |
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Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Caroline Criado Perez | The book describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias in big data collection. |
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants | Robin Wall Kimmerer | A book about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies. |
Stats
| FicNonfic | PageCount | BookCount |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction | 26,095 | 65 |
| Nonfiction | 16,613 | 52 |
| Total | 42,708 | 117 |
All Books
Top 25’s
These include books read back to 2015 and occasionally before.
Fiction
Earth-based Spec Fic
| Book | Author | Series |
|---|---|---|
| Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card | Ender’s Saga 1 |
| Speaker for the Dead | Orson Scott Card | Ender’s Saga 2 |
| Xenocide | Orson Scott Card | Ender’s Saga 3 |
| Children of the Mind | Orson Scott Card | Ender’s Saga 4 |
| The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | Hitchhiker’s Guide 1 |
| The Restaurant at the End of the Universe | Douglas Adams | Hitchhiker’s Guide 2 |
| Life, the Universe and Everything | Douglas Adams | Hitchhiker’s Guide 3 |
| So Long and Thanks for All the Fish | Douglas Adams | Hitchhiker’s Guide 4 |
| Doomsday Book | Connie Willis | Oxford Time Travel #1 |
| To Say Nothing of the Dog | Connie Willis | Oxford Time Travel #2 |
| Blackout | Connie Willis | Oxford Time Travel #3, All Clear #1 |
| All Clear | Connie Willis | Oxford Time Travel #4, All Clear #2 |
| The Three-Body Problem | Liu Cixin | Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 1 |
| The Dark Forest | Liu Cixin | Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 2 |
| Death’s End | Liu Cixin | Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 3 |
| Leviathan Wakes | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 01 |
| Caliban’s War | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 02 |
| Abaddon’s Gate | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 03 |
| Cibola Burn | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 04 |
| Nemesis Games | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 05 |
| Babylon’s Ashes | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 06 |
| Persepolis Rising | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 07 |
| Tiamat’s Wrath | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 08 |
| Leviathan Falls | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - 09 |
| Memory’s Legion | James S.A. Corey | The Expanse - novellas |
Non-Earth Spec Fic Series
| Book | Author | Series |
|---|---|---|
| The Fifth Season | N.K. Jemisin | Broken Earth - 1 |
| The Obelisk Gate | N.K. Jemisin | Broken Earth - 2 |
| The Stone Sky | N.K. Jemisin | Broken Earth - 3 |
| Hyperion | Dan Simmons | Hyperion Cantos - 01 |
| The Fall of Hyperion | Dan Simmons | Hyperion Cantos - 02 |
| Endymion | Dan Simmons | Hyperion Cantos - 03 |
| The Rise of Endymion | Dan Simmons | Hyperion Cantos - 04 |
| Ancillary Justice | Ann Leckie | Imperial Radch - 01 |
| Ancillary Sword | Ann Leckie | Imperial Radch - 02 |
| Ancillary Mercy | Ann Leckie | Imperial Radch - 03 |
| The Fellowship of the Ring | JRR Tolkien | Lord of the Rings 1 |
| The Two Towers | JRR Tolkien | Lord of the Rings 2 |
| The Return of the King | JRR Tolkien | Lord of the Rings 3 |
| A Memory Called Empire | Arkady Martine | Teixcalaan - 01 |
| A Desolation Called Peace | Arkady Martine | Teixcalaan - 02 |
| Ninefox Gambit | Yoon Ha Lee | The Machineries of Empire - 01 |
| Raven Stratagem | Yoon Ha Lee | The Machineries of Empire - 02 |
| Revenant Gun | Yoon Ha Lee | The Machineries of Empire - 03 |
| All Systems Red | Martha Wells | The Murderbot Diaries - 01 |
| Artificial Condition | Martha Wells | The Murderbot Diaries - 02 |
| Rogue Protocol | Martha Wells | The Murderbot Diaries - 03 |
| Exit Strategy | Martha Wells | The Murderbot Diaries - 04 |
| Network Effect | Martha Wells | The Murderbot Diaries - 05 |
| Fugitive Telemetry | Martha Wells | The Murderbot Diaries - 06 |
Speculative Fiction
| Book | Author |
|---|---|
| A Master of Djinn | P. Djeli Clark |
| An Unkindness of Ghosts | Rivers Solomon |
| Cloud Cuckoo Land | Anthony Doerr |
| Good Omens | Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman |
| Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell | Susanna Clarke |
| Kindred | Octavia E. Butler |
| Klara and the Sun | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Migrations | Charlotte McConaghy |
| Moon of the Crusted Snow | Waubgeshig Rice |
| Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Neverwhere | Neil Gaiman |
| Piranesi | Susanna Clarke |
| Sea of Tranquility | Emily St. John Mandel |
| Seveneves | Neal Stephenson |
| Shades of Grey | Jasper Fforde |
| Station Eleven | Emily St. John Mandel |
| The Graveyard Book | Neil Gaiman |
| The Invisible Life of Addie Larue | V.E. Schwab |
| The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse | Louise Erdrich |
| The Left Hand Of Darkness | Ursula K Le Guin |
| The Martian | Andy Weir |
| The Road | Cormac McCarthy |
| The Stand | Stephen King |
| The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead |
| The Vanished Birds | Simon Jimenez |
Contemporary Fiction
| Book | Author |
|---|---|
| All My Puny Sorrows | Miriam Toews |
| Brother | David Chariandy |
| Daughters of Smoke and Fire | Ava Homa |
| Disappearing Earth | Julia Phillips |
| Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine | Gail Honeyman |
| Empire Falls | Richard Russo |
| Five Little Indians | Michelle Good |
| Go, Went, Gone | Jenny Erpenbeck |
| Greenwood | Michael Christie |
| Little Fires Everywhere | Celeste Ng |
| Night of the Living Rez | Morgan Talty |
| Once There Were Wolves | Charlotte McConaghy |
| Shuggie Bain | Douglas Stuart |
| Sing, Unburied, Sing | Jesmyn Ward |
| Sweetness in the Belly | Camilla Gibb |
| The Glass Hotel | Emily St. John Mandel |
| The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt |
| The Illegal | Lawrence Hill |
| The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois | Honoree Fanonne Jeffers |
| The Overstory | Richard Powers |
| The Round House | Louise Erdrich |
| The Strangers | Katherena Vermette |
| There There | Tommy Orange |
| Transcendent Kingdom | Yaa Gyasi |
| What Strange Paradise | Omar El Akkad |
Historical Fiction
| Book | Author |
|---|---|
| A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry |
| A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles |
| All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson |
| East of Eden | John Steinbeck |
| Half of a Yellow Sun | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
| Homegoing | Yaa Gyasi |
| Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry |
| Love Medicine | Louise Erdrich |
| Pachinko | Min Jin Lee |
| Purple Hibiscus | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
| Roots | Alex Haley |
| Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan |
| The Book of Negroes | Lawrence Hill |
| The Brothers K | David James Duncan |
| The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers |
| The Mountains Sing | Nguyen Phan Que Mai |
| The Nickel Boys | Colson Whitehead |
| The Night Watchman | Louise Erdrich |
| The Shadow King | Maaza Mengiste |
| The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafon |
| The Vanishing Half | Brit Bennett |
| Underworld | Don DeLillo |
| Washington Black | Esi Edugyan |
Non-Fiction
History / Memoir / Narrative
| Book | Author |
|---|---|
| Blood in the Water | Heather Ann Thompson |
| Born a Crime | Trevor Noah |
| Dark Money | Jane Mayer |
| Educated | Tara Westover |
| Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Patrick Radden Keefe |
| I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou |
| Killers of the Flower Moon | David Grann |
| Kitchen Confidential | Anthony Bourdain |
| Know My Name | Chanel Miller |
| Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine | James Maskalyk |
| Living Brave: Lessons from Hurt, Lighting the Way to Hope | Shannon Dingle |
| Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family | Amanda Jette Knox |
| Midnight in Chernobyl | Adam Higginbotham |
| Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Barbara Demick |
| One L | Scott Turow |
| One Native Life | Richard Wagamese |
| Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers | Andy Greenberg |
| The Big Short | Michael Lewis |
| The Disordered Cosmos | Chanda Prescod-Weinstein |
| The North-West is Our Mother | Jean Teillet |
| They Said This Would Be Fun | Eternity Martis |
| Up Ghost River | Edmund Metatawabin |
| Voices from Chernobyl | Svetlana Alexievich |
| When Breath Becomes Air | Paul Kalanithi |
| Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China | Jung Chang |
Science / Nature
| Book | Author |
|---|---|
| A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey | Jonathan Meiburg |
| A Short History of Nearly Everything | Bill Bryson |
| Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End | Atul Gawande |
| Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants | Robin Wall Kimmerer |
| Drawdown | Paul Hawken |
| Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter | Ben Goldfarb |
| Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures | Merlin Sheldrake |
| Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest | Suzanne Simard |
| Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses | Robin Wall Kimmerer |
| H Is For Hawk | Helen Macdonald |
| Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Caroline Criado Perez |
| Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey | James Rebanks |
| The Body: A Guide for Occupants | Bill Bryson |
| The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer | Charles Graeber |
| The Code Book | Singh, Simon |
| The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
| The Gene: An Intimate History | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
| The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot |
| The Invisible Kingdom | Meghan O’Rourke |
| The Redemption of Wolf 302 | Rick McIntyre |
| The Reign of Wolf 21 | Rick McIntyre |
| The Rise of Wolf 8 | Rick McIntyre |
| The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
| The Wisdom of Wolves - Lessons from the Sawtooth Pack | Jim & Jamie Dutcher |
| Underland: A Deep Time Journey | Robert Macfarlane |
| Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life | Lulu Miller |
Other Non-Fiction
| Book | Author |
|---|---|
| A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life | George Saunders |
| Basketball (and Other Things) | Shea Serrano |
| Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History | Erik Malinowski |
| Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life | Anne Lamott |
| Embers | Richard Wagamese |
| Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Hofstadter, Douglas R. |
| How To Be Perfect | Michael Schur |
| If the Oceans were Ink | Carla Power |
| Impossible Owls | Brian Phillips |
| K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches | Tyler Kepner |
| Meander, Spiral, Explode | Jane Alison |
| Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game | Michael Lewis |
| Movies (and Other Things) | Shea Serrano |
| One Story, One Song | Richard Wagamese |
| The Arm | Jeff Passan |
| The Baseball 100 | Joe Posnanski |
| The Book of Basketball | Bill Simmons |
| The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business | Wright Thompson |
| The Monk of Mokha | Dave Eggers |
| The Only Rule Is It Has To Work | Ben Lindbergh & Sam Miller |
| The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking | Russell Carleton |
| The Soul of Baseball | Joe Posnanski |
| What is the What | Dave Eggers |
| Where Nobody Knows Your Name | John Feinstein |
| You’re a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass) | Mike McHargue |
Full Lists
Lists are sortable and searchable. First is the fiction and non-fiction I’ve read since 2015 (when I started tracking), then are the books I currently own, split into read and unread.
Reading List
Fiction read since 2015
Non-Fiction read since 2015
Personal Bookshelf
Unread
Read
Looking for Book Recommendations?
These are some of the sites I look at for book reviews and lists of books.
* Literary Hub - Recommendations and reviews over all categories
* Book Riot - Recommendations and reviews over all categories
* Tor.com - Science Fiction and Fantasy
* Book Marks - Aggregated reviews of books
* NPR Books - NPR’s favourite books of the year (2022-2013), sortable by many categories
* Literature Map - Put in an author you like, and find a bunch of new ones you might enjoy
* Five Books - Top 5’s in a bunch of categories
* Electric Literature - Reading lists, articles, essays, and more
Social Justice